I ate lunch as I watched the footage of a drone flying over Hong Kong at night and at first I was confused as to whether the images were real or not. As you watch more of the video you see that everything is real. The depth of field is good and so is the exposure. There is no or very little noise from this being shot at night.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYO1uk7vIcc
You see buildings, cars, traffic and more. You see things from above, others from the side and yet more from eye level. There is an interesting flight by an office building where we can look into the lit offices.
Another beautiful shot is the shot of the shipping containers that are on a shipping container as it sails. There are plenty of shots in this video to show that you can give time for images to breath. People will enjoy watching this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e10pVhxNOco
There are some atmospheric shots of Budapest. We begin with a drone flying over a tram as it makes its way across a bridge. We then see the city and a variety of landmarks and more. It’s an interesting video to watch in 4K.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKaVhXn49xY
A timelapse from the top of an ice breaker as it breaks through the ice is familiar. Less familiar is the moment when two ships are next to each other. Even less familiar is when The Icebreaker attaches itself to the stuck ship and pulls it back to freedom. It’s a scene that is unfamiliar to many of us.
It is not rare for me to do a timelapse from La Barillette. Several years ago I tried a timelapse with a 360 camera where you saw clouds forming overhead and in a spherical video. I also filmed a timelapse of the Paléo parkings filling up. This time I went up the Jura in the hope of filming Autumn colours but as I got to the top my project changed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yPSUd2z434
The problem with filming Autumn colours is that you need to be there at the right time of day and with the light coming from the right direction. The light was coming from the wrong angle so stopping in the woods would have allowed me to get three or four frames before moving on to the next location.
When you’re in a car this type of filming is not interesting. It’s more interesting to get to one location and get a greater diversity of shots. The other advantage is that you can always head back down and get the shots you thought were still interesting.
As I looked from above and assessed the situation I saw that clouds were forming and dissipating. I thought that I may eventually find myself in a cloud with poor visibility. I was more interested in capturing the formation of clouds. They did form, but then they dissipated, and then they formed again but more sparsly before dissipating again.
This is fantastic when you’re filming time-lapses because the change is noticeable without being accelerated so you can imagine what it would give if you did speed it up.
The challenge with timelapse is knowing whether something will take minutes, hours, days or even longer to capture. I have one idea that I assess would take six or seven hours which I will not discuss at this stage.
Usually when I film timelapses I set the camera up so that it records one or two frames every so many seconds. In this case I just started recording. I did not know on what timescale the actions would occur so it gave me greater flexibility in post production.
The footage was sped up from 800 percent to 5000 percent. The clouds that were vanishing was fast. The river of clouds flowing down the valley was slower and thus sped up more. The other challenge is to decide how tight or wide you want the frame to be. With the trees and the river of clouds it’s hard to know whether to have a tighter shot where the action may render the frame boring sooner or wehter tom have a wide shot where the action only takes up half the screen.
In the end this is about gaining experience rather than getting things right first time. It’s about learning to see and anticipate how nature will behave. If you get it right then it can be of great beauty. If you get it wrong you ignore it and think of a new idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5AK3mmNMLg
Later in the year, when Autumn comes we can expect the clouds to behave like this. It’s the “Soupe de Pois” as some call it. I have at least two or three ideas to experiment with and two of them can be done from the comfort of home.
I did see something exceptional on the way back down. A herd of five chevreuils as I drove down afer I finished getting my timelapse footage. That’s the most I’ve seen at once when driving.
A century ago Dennis Arkadievitch Kaufmann, more commonly known as Dziga Vertov, the spinning top, came up with the concept of the All-Seeing Eye. The Kinoki. The Cinema Eye. His idea was that with time life unawares could be documented and daily life would be captured by cameras for everyone to see.
https://youtu.be/yzxrSX79oz4
Until recently the idea of filming and documenting everyone with video and photo cameras was an act of fiction. Rolls of films had only 36 frames and DV tapes only lasted 63 minutes. Cameras were dedicated devices that you did not have with you at all times and to take pictures was expensive and you needed space for storage.
If we were to take 36 pictures I think we would have paid 1.20 CHF per image recently. DV tapes were about 15 CHF per tape depending on how many you bought at once.
Today we have two or three cameras with us at all times with gigabytes of storage. With the iPhone we could easily take a thousand pictures in a day if we had a way of recharging the battery halfway through.
We also have the means to share these images. We have Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Whatsapp. We also have blogs. We could mention Flickr and SmugMug but they have angered those who loved their site to the point of losing their users.
When I was streaming live from Paléo a few years ago I was groundbreaking by using the phone and QIK or Bambuser.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTwDK863xJo
Manu Chao – Paléo 26 July 2008
Fast forward a few years and live streaming of music events has progressed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiEtLmnUfXM
We have gone from cameras that were stuck on the ground and barely moved to FPV video cameras that fly and follow snowboarders as they jump and slide down mountain faces. The camera no longer needs to be on the ground to be steady and get good images. Without weight the Kinoki can see scenes like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5a5mRe60sE
These all-seeing eyes can also fly in the landscape and show us the world as only a wingsuit flyer could have seen it in the past. We can see the same things without risking our lives or devoting hours of training to get to the right level of competence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyrq-qzOx1U
We then see Paris in the 1900s and now. We see how some things have stayed exactly the same and how other things have changed. The main difference is that in the 1900s it would have been a wooden camera with a wooden tripod and in modern days a carbon fibre tripod with a modern camera.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGQYFG4YHGw
There is also this footage of 1900s Paris in colour.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ue20LntcV2A
The All-Seeing Eye then takes us to 1911 New York and we see life with cars and people walking across a street. Sound was added later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aohXOpKtns0
An old-style educational video of how hydraulic steering works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDiOKqMKTO8
Compare to this modern documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL_mJeb6O04
When we jump forward a few decades we have this footage of 1960s London.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zk0eyKzp1c
Of course the diversity captured by the All Seeing Eye does not stop there. We often come across arts that are preserved by a single individual, which thanks to the all seeing eye, is preserved for future generations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITzYSYi_rGE
When I was on one of my daily walks I expected that this would be a long written blog post about theories and reasoning but in the end it becomes a collection of videos to explore the diversity of topics that the “all-seeing eye” can capture. The topic is broad and this is just a tiny glimpse.
Translated from French, Sport the nicest of meetings reminds me of the legend that is told in Il Nuovo Cinema Paradiso. In Il Nuovo Cinema Paradiso we hear about the guy who waits outside a woman’s window for one hundred days and nights to show his devotion to her, and in the end he loses interest.
This is following the same theme except that rather than a man lusting after a woman it is the other way around. Instead of a woman using crappy dating apps and other rubbish she sees someone she finds visually appealing and so decides to take up running. At first she is slow but with time she gets fitter and she can keep with the group for longer and longer.
Eventually she excels beyond the group and she pulls alongside the guy, just long enough to make us believe in the stereotypical ending but nope, she pulls ahead and continues running. You take up sport because you want to seduce but eventually your passion for the sport takes over.
Today I went down to the Nyon Lakeside to play with the camera to try it out. I watched the video playback and it looked fine. I saw some pixelation between a girl’s face and her hair when she was walking and some artefacts just around the people’s bodies as they move. That’s at 1440*1020, not full resolution. I’ll have to find time to do test at full HD quality during my days off.
Please note that for monitoring I was using a 40″ Sony Bravia and standing a few centimeters away. From a few meters back it looked fine.
is an automated service that grabs videos from RSS feeds and converts them to 3gpp for easy download to the N95 and other mobile phones running the s60 OS. There are a number of default shows including MobuzzTV, Zefrank, National Geographic, DiggNation, Rocketboom and a number of other well known shows.
In the right hand column you have another four methods of accessing content, searching, browsing according to keywords, highest rated or what’s new. The second option is to browse through the directories they have selected to find the categories that are closest to your particular interests.
The final element is add a channel. If I wanted to I could take the RSS feed for the videos I have produced and create a channel to share with others with tags and more. The Personal feed is like a channel but for private use. The search feed works according to tags placed by other people in their videos. If you want video content about a music festival or event in a town by where you live then add those search terms and when video content appears it will be fed straight to your phone. Add youtube feed and video clip are self explanatory.
The website does not limit itself to the feeds that they have selected. With their firefox extension you may go to the youtube content of your choice and create channels of your choice. They appear in your account on the Interbine website.
Over the AIR (OTA) deliver
Once all the shows you want have been selected and the interbine application is selected you have a number of methods for downloading content over the air (OTA). These are WIFI, via the phone carrier and bluetooth. The option I have tested most extensively is Wifi. Once you’re in the application you have the option to sync all the video data you have selected and it will come to your phone for later viewing.
Since this is a mobile device there are a number of settings that are relevant, especially if you choose to get data via the carrier. These are how much space to allocate on the phone, how much data transfer you want to allow per month and how long the data will stay on your phone.
The Player
The application has a built in player that allows you to view the content per channel and then per video, allows for resuming, and syncing of the media for viewing. So far though I have had one minor inconvenience. I can’t get sound to work. I had the same problem with the youtube player so i don’t mind. (Turns out that problem was due to the warnings being off on the sound profile. That has since been fixed and it works fine) The work around has been to use the media gallery, play the content once and delete it once viewed.
What I like
What I like about this service is that it makes video content retrieval and viewing a far smoother experience than before. It may take some time to set up but once everything set according to your preferences everything else is automatic. Once you get back from work you open the application, sync your content and the next morning as you commute you’ve got a choice of video content to watch.
I’m active on more social networks than I have time to go through in a day and that’s where Socialthing comes in. It allows me to follow news from facebook, twitter, pownce, tumblr, flickr, vimeo and livejournal. What I like about this site is how easy it is to see everything that goes on.
Whereas friendfeed is nothing more than a few lines of text this version of a social feed aggregator is the visual aspect. At a glance I can see which social network is giving the content and I can post accordingly. If I see a status update on facebook for example I can view the profile and add a comment. There’s that option with twitter too. I can see everyone’s tweet and I can reply to any friend’s post quickly and easily.
As a positive sidenote I can follow what’s going on on pownce without logging in. I’ve often felt that the limitations of that site is the lack of people outside of California using it. At least this way I may find my interest growing.
If I’m in a rush or there’s an important message to get out I can simply select to “post” a message to all these social networks at once. That saves a lot of time although as expected this should not be used too frequently as it adds a lot of “noise”. I’m looking forward to more services being included
The Francofous are a good group of people and last night we spent a few hours playing with Yahoo Live and skype. Skype provided the audio whilst yahoo live provided the video platform. Yahoo live is limited in the way we can watch and follow video so I created a simple video wall. The principle is simple. i get all the videos embedded into one page and we can watch everyone chat with everyone else. It’s a really nice experience and I’m going to improve the layout for future games.
Yahoo live is an interesting live video conferencing tool still in it’s early days. It allows you to stream video live from your webcam and watch up to four other streams at the same time. There’s a chatroom and you can see all the participants at once and select which ones you want in vision and which you’d prefer out of vision.
There are a few bugs at the moment. I haven’t found sound that easy to deal with, especially since there’s a five to ten second delay. Chatting with Msiou he told me that what he had done is use skype conference calls to keep the conversation going. Of course this is a makeshift solution and some better interaction should come.
Today whilst surfing through the webapps I found one that’s great for what I do, share video content via the web. I found Vtap, a video sharing website that allows you to search through, select and stream videos straight through to your iphone or Ipod touch without either converting it to an ipod compatible format or using the youtube website.
For certain videos it gave me a feedreader rather than playing the videos but for those that are already indexed it works well. It’s definitely worth a try and it’s a taste of the future.
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